Category: Google Search Engine Optimization

This is probably common sense and a topic we’ve covered numerous times here before. But if you take something you’ve published and then distribute that content to be republished on other sites or another site, those other sites may rank above you for t…

One of the new Google snippet controls, the new meta tags, recently launched, had a bug where it can trigger Google to deindex the specific page. If you used max-image-preview tag and set the value to none, it would result in Google removing the page…

I’ve been covering search for a while and sometimes you see questions you really haven’t seen before, this is one of those times. Someone asked Google’s John Mueller if Google still has an indexing limit of 250 static pages per web site. The answer is…

There is a known issue of some sorts with following the Google help documents around getting Google to pick up on your noindex tags faster through the fetch as Google. John Mueller of Google is aware of the issue and said the workaround “is to test th…

Yesterday, Google added a new search appearance filter to the Google Search Console performance reports for “product results.” If you use product rich result markup on your pages, you are eligible to see this data in Search Console.

Google has documented that it lost or “dropped” data around image search clicks. Google wrote “Some image click data was dropped; as a result, you might see a dip in both click rate and CTR during this period. The issue has been fixed. This issue affe…

Google announced yesterday on Twitter that the rich results test can now show you how your recipe mark up looks not just in Google Search but also on Google Home devices and smart displays. Here is a screen shot from Google showing this in action.
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Google’s John Mueller had to say on Twitter again that Google does not penalize sites using old school HTML, like old table designs or invalid HTML. He said “no, we don’t penalize sites that use old-school (or invalid, table-designs, etc) HTML.”
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Matt Cutts, who has not been with Google for a long time now, was asked to comment about alleged action Google took on a site a dozen or so years ago. Matt said he doesn’t specifically recommend this case but said in general “In many of the cases I sa…

Google posted on Twitter on the Google Webmaster account that Chrome is making changes to how it handles mixed content and you should be on top of it for your users. Also mixed content can break your HTTPS security, but as we know, the HTTPS ranking b…

Daniel Waisberg from the Google Search Console team said while on stage at SMX East this week that the Search Console team is working on “new email stuff.” It is unclear what exactly this new email stuff is but there have been complaints from SEOs tha…

Lizzi Harvey from Google announced that the video structured data doc got a big refresh. I took a quick look and yes, it is so much better. Google added More screenshots, how to mark timestamps on YouTube videos, how monitor your video performance wi…

Yesterday at SMX, Daniel Waisberg, Search Advocate at Google who works with the Search Console team, announced a new YouTube series on the Google Webmaster channel named Search Console Training. Yep, this series will train folks on how to use Google S…

Martin Splitt from Google announced at the Chrome Dev Summit 2019 that the median time for GoogleBot to render is 5 seconds. But even the 90th percentile is done “in minutes” he said. He said “you don’t have to worry about week long delays” for rende…

John Mueller from Google said that generally Google is quicker at processing malware reviews than hacked content reviews. Malware is when you have some some of malware installed on your web site, removing it and submitting a reconsideration request wil…

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter “Google doesn’t use the spam score.” This was in response to someone saying they have an 11% spam score (I guess on some third-party tool). Yes, your site can have either one or more algorithmic penalties or manua…

Gary Illyes from Google was quoted as saying “We rewrite page titles in a low number of cases.” Jennifer Slegg also loosely quoted him as saying “if Google is rewriting your titles, that is a sign you should work on rewriting those titles.” This is f…

John Mueller of Google reminds us that when you use the geographic target setting in Google Search Console it will not stop you from getting traffic to your site from users outside of that target region. All it does is help Google understand your site …

Kieron Hughes posted on Twitter that he is seeing a test where Google is not displaying a site’s normal snippet in the search results when Google displays that URL for the featured snippet. Generally when Google shows a URL as a featured snippet, it wi…

We all get it and get it a lot, email spam selling links, DA, PR, and metrics around trying to improve your rankings in Google by manipulating Google’s algorithm. Some of this spam comes from places like India (not all) and Gary Illyes from Google sai…